Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (27 page)

1835–
1838

F
irst they took his house. It happened in early 1835, while Ross was in Washington for more failed negotiations (the Senate raised the offer to $5 million; Ross had seemed ready to accept whatever the Senate would pay, but then backed away;
he was by then demanding $
20
million). While the principal chief was away in the capital, the white family that claimed Ross’s home through the Georgia lottery took possession. The Georgia Guard tried to send word to Ross in Washington that his house was gone, but the message missed him. He had no idea as he made the long journey home. He arrived at Head of Coosa late at night to discover his family missing and a different family in their place. The new owner, irked to be awakened, barked that he had no idea where the Indian’s wife and children might have gone. Softening a little, and noting the lateness of the hour, the man offered Ross a room for the night, and in the morning charged Ross a fee for the care of his horse. Ross tracked down his family and moved them to Cherokee land in Tennessee, where
they took up residence in a two-room cabin.

After taking his home, they took Ross’s voice. In August 1835 the
Cherokee Phoenix
printing press was still located at New Echota, though publication had been suspended due to the difficulty in finding a competent staff. Ross sent a wagon to bring the press to Tennessee, but
the Georgia Guard reached New Echota first. They seized the press, finally following the advice of Jackson’s onetime attorney general, John Macpherson Berrien, who had said that this instrument of Cherokee power should be removed. Generations later, archaeologists would find no sign of the
Phoenix
except
about fifteen hundred pieces of old metal type on the ground.

After his voice, they took Ross’s freedom. On the night of November 7, 1835, he was in his Tennessee cabin with a visitor. They heard dogs barking outside, and then a hoarse voice: “Ross, Ross!” Armed men crowded into the house. “We have business with you, sir,” said one of the rifle-toting men. “
You are to consider yourself a prisoner.”

Ross’s guest at the time of the intrusion was a well-known writer and playwright, John Howard Payne. He was in the Cherokee Nation gathering material for a literary magazine, and was about to obtain more material than expected. According to the account Payne wrote soon afterward, Ross remained calm. “
Well, gentlemen, I shall not resist,” Ross told the gunmen. “Why am I a prisoner? By whose order am I taken?”

“You’ll know that soon enough,” one of his captors replied.

The gunmen were members of the Georgia Guard, so zealous in protecting the sovereignty of Georgia that they had invaded Tennessee. The men loaded Ross, his visitor, and their papers onto horses and rode south into Georgia. “
A wild storm arose,” Payne recalled, and “rain poured in torrents. The movements of our escort were exceedingly capricious; sometimes whooping and galloping and singing obscene songs, and sometimes for a season walking in sullen silence.” Payne claimed to have heard one of his guards humming “Home, Sweet Home,” a popular tune of the era. Payne was delighted. He was the author of that song. By dawn the dripping party had reached its destination, a windowless cabin where Ross and Payne were instructed to remain with the door always open and guards nearby. The gunmen would later accuse Ross and his guest of a conspiracy “
to raise an
insurrection among the negroes, who are to join the Indians against the whites.”

Payne wrote a description of the Cherokee leader at the time of his detention. Ross was “
of middle size—rather under than over;—his age about five & forty: he is mild, intelligent & entirely unaffected.” Georgians had previously warned Payne not to waste time with this “sordid” and “silent” man, but Payne found Ross “different in every respect from what he had been represented to be.” Ross feared for a time that they might be lynched, but their captors became less strident as the days passed. Possibly their improving attitude was a reaction to the uproar spreading in the world outside the cabin. Tennesseans regarded the raid as a violation of their state sovereignty. A Tennessee newspaper dubbed the raiders a “
mob extraordinary,” while the
governor of Tennessee wrote his counterpart in Georgia demanding that he disavow the raid or else Tennessee might raise a paramilitary force of its own. Georgia’s governor danced away from the controversy, saying he knew nothing of the arrest except “
common street rumor.” Ross and Payne were both released by late November.

Having monitored the chatter of his guards, Ross concluded that his detention was not directed by the state. The Georgia Guard seemed to have acted at the urging of a federal Indian agent—the Superintendent of Cherokee Emigration, a representative of President Jackson. Ross’s suspicion proved to be correct. The agent,
Major Benjamin F. Currey, a native of Nashville and an associate of the president, had been taking progressively more extreme measures. It was Currey who persuaded the Georgia Guard to seize the printing press, and who persuaded a friendly guard unit to stage the cross-border raid. He was hoping that an illegal detention would separate Ross from his people, even though his eventual release was inevitable. It was a bonus to have John Howard Payne swept up in the dragnet. In a letter to a newspaper, Currey declared that Payne was a
member “of the whig party, and rumor makes him an abolitionist,” who was conspiring with hostile newspapers to publish articles for “political effect.”

 • • • 

The most revealing part of Ross’s capture was the chain of events leading up to it. The raid on his house went forward only after Major Currey tried for years to bypass the chief using less drastic measures.

When first assigned to the Cherokee country in 1831, Major Currey and other Jackson men assumed they were battling corrupt tribal elites. Their attitude resembled that of Americans in later generations who tried to control nations such as Iraq. They were so convinced of the righteousness of their values and their commonsense policies that it was hard to imagine that any native could honestly disagree. If the natives opposed U.S. policy, it could only mean that they were deluded or intimidated by corrupt leaders. Jackson’s men, infused with the democratic spirit of the era, were so certain that the common people of the Cherokee Nation must be on their side against John Ross that they repeatedly tried to appeal to the Cherokee masses through democratic means. In this way they created a lengthy record of what many Cherokees actually believed.

White authorities’ starting assumption about the Cherokees was put on paper around the time of Major Currey’s arrival in 1831. In that year a Georgia official investigated the Cherokee leadership and concluded that Ross and his allies were not Indian enough. The official’s report found that “
the native Indian has but little part” in ruling the Cherokee Nation, which was controlled “exclusively by those who are so remotely related to the Indian, as gives them but slender claims to be classed among that people.” Half-breeds and mixed-bloods could not possibly represent the will of the more numerous full-blooded Indians. It was to break the grip of these mixed-bloods that Currey and other white officials attempted to apply the corrective tonic of democracy.

They arranged a series of public votes on the issue of Cherokee annuities. Jackson was still refusing to pay the Cherokee government for past sales of land rights, vowing instead that the money must be
distributed to individuals. In 1834 Jackson’s men called for a plebiscite to resolve the stalemate at a poorly attended meeting at Red Clay, Tennessee. Though Jackson’s men refused to allow Ross to observe the balloting, Ross won the vote, with
388 in favor of paying the Cherokee government, and only one single Cherokee voting to pay individuals. Concluding that this must have been a Ross-orchestrated fraud, the administration still held back the money and tried democracy again. There was another vote at a much larger meeting of Cherokees in the summer of 1835. This mass meeting was addressed by the Reverend John F. Schermerhorn, a representative of Jackson’s administration who had taken on Indian removal as a holy cause. Schermerhorn,
regarding Ross as the “devil,” wanted to become the instrument of Cherokee salvation. He had a pulpit constructed from which to deliver his speech. Ross, too, addressed the crowd, and when it came time to vote,
Ross won, 2,225–114, capturing 95 percent of the vote.

In October 1835 Reverend Schermerhorn and Major Currey tried yet again at a meeting of the Cherokee legislature. They wanted the lawmakers to endorse a proposed removal treaty that had been worked out by a renegade delegation of the Treaty Party. The legislators rejected the treaty. Ross not only won again, he even managed to unite his party and the opposition, at least on the surface. It was agreed that Cherokees from both parties would be included in the delegation to be sent to Washington that winter—John Ridge and Elias Boudinot would be there alongside Ross, seeking to find some agreement with the government together. This was the final outrage for Major Currey. “
The strange results of this council, and the increased insolence of the Indians,” he wrote, must be a result of Ross’s vile influence as well as that of Payne the writer. Casting off democracy, Currey summoned a friendly unit of the Georgia Guard, and the November arrest went ahead.

It is hard to say what role Ross’s days out of circulation in November played in the disaster that followed soon after. He could not keep his coalition together. John Ridge remained a member of the delegation
assigned to travel to Washington, but made it clear that he was hoping to persuade his chief to sign a removal treaty. Elias Boudinot dropped out of the delegation entirely. By December Ross was leaving the Cherokee Nation, heading for the capital while leaving Boudinot and dissenting members of the Treaty Party behind. As soon as Ross was gone, Reverend Schermerhorn proposed a national council for a treaty negotiation to begin in the Cherokee Nation on December 19. He declared that any Indians who failed to attend this national council would be presumed to accept whatever was done. To give the meeting what legitimacy he could, Schermerhorn said the negotiation should take place in New Echota, the Cherokee capital, from which the government had been forced to relocate long ago.

 • • • 

The leaders of the Treaty Party began gathering in New Echota in the week before Christmas. They found the village, which had never been large, partly empty and decrepit. The council house and courthouse had not served their appointed functions in years. The printshop was empty except for some scattered Cherokee type. The Worcesters were long gone from their house down the path, although Elias and Harriett Boudinot still had their home in the lonely village, where they were expecting another child. Buildings were in disrepair. As discussions began in the council house,
the roof caught fire, forcing a temporary evacuation. But for ten days before and after Christmas the village came to life.

There was relatively little negotiation required. The Treaty Party already had a template, the provisional treaty Cherokee legislators had just rejected. They had a price range as well, the offer of $5 million John Ross had rejected at the start of the year. What remained was for the Treaty Party and the federal negotiators to agree on details and persuade the world that their act represented the will of the Cherokee people. This would not be easy. Public attendance at the conference was disappointingly small. At most, a few hundred Cherokees attended.
The one time a vote was held, only
eighty-two men were counted, seventy-five for the motion and seven against. But if they did not have numbers or the sanction of Cherokee law, they did have a giant among them—a leader, a diplomat, the uncle of Elias Boudinot, the father of John Ridge, the onetime political sponsor of John Ross. He was the friend of Andrew Jackson, known in Washington for his wealth and cultivation, whose portrait hung for years in the Indian office: a man substantial enough to make a dubious treaty seem real.

The Treaty Party had Major Ridge.

Why did he proceed? There is one account of a speech Major Ridge is said to have given to the group at New Echota. “
The Georgians have shown a grasping spirit lately,” he is recorded as saying, “but I can do them justice in my heart. They think the Great Father, the President, is bound by the compact of 1802 to purchase this country for them, and they justify their conduct by the end in view. They are willing to buy these lands. . . . We can never forget [our] homes, I know, but an unbending, iron necessity tells us we must leave them . . . any forcible effort to keep them will cost us our lands, our lives, and the lives of our children.” It was an eloquent speech, though it is uncertain Ridge ever said it. It only appeared in print fifty years later, and even then was recorded by a sympathetic white Georgian who was unlikely to be familiar with the original Cherokee. Better evidence of Ridge’s thoughts is contained in the letters of his son and nephew, who probably reflected some of Ridge’s views. John Ridge recorded the sufferings of the Cherokee people and the unrealistic stubbornness of Chief John Ross. Elias Boudinot argued for the right of an elite group like the Treaty Party to make a decision for the people at large. Never pretending to command a majority in this age of majority rule, Boudinot knew that he must explain. “
If one hundred persons are ignorant of their true situation,” he wrote, “we can see strong reasons to justify the action of a minority of fifty persons—to do what the majority would do if they understood their condition.” The minority must save the people from “destruction” and from “moral degradation.”

Major Ridge’s personal economic calculation was significantly different from that of the common people on whose behalf he acted. Removal would cost him his land, but Ridge would find new land in the West. He would be paid for his handsome house and other improvements that he was leaving behind. And he would be able to take along his most valuable property, his highly portable workforce of slaves. Poorer people could not see the move the same way. They had less portable property and would be paid much less for their improvements. But the decision for Ridge could not have been merely financial, for observers twice recorded him saying he expected to be killed for signing the treaty. By way of explanation it can only be said that Ridge was a leader. He had led the way in overturning the ancient law of revenge. He had led the way in the civilization program. Now he would lead his people west.